Abstract
This essay reconsiders the photomontages that Martha Rosler began making in the late 1960s to protest the war in Vietnam. Typically understood as a means of protest against the spatial mechanics of domination—against the mediated production of the difference between the home front and the war front or the “here” and “there” that drives modern warfare—the photomontages, this essay argues, also engage the temporal politics of protest. The problem of how to be “in time,” “to be present,” the problem that frames street photography and its critical history, is at the center of this essay and, it contends, Rosler’s protest. By drawing out this critical framework, this essay addresses the still-urgent questions that Rosler’s photomontages pose: When is the time of protest? Does protest happen now? Is there still time for protest?
Highlights
I turn to a set of images that seem to be far removed from the genre of street photography: the photomontages Martha Rosler began making in the late 1960s to protest the war in Vietnam
Rosler cut glossy images of the figures of war—soldiers, civilians and protesters—from back issues of Life magazine and pasted them into scenes of domestic comfort that had been culled from contemporary design magazines, such as House Beautiful
Two American soldiers lurk and load guns in a bright, white kitchen; in another, a spectacled protester peers into a boys’ bedroom (Figures 1 and 2). With this simple act of cutting and pasting the news, Rosler reframed the way in which the war in Vietnam was being framed.[1]
Summary
I want to end this special issue in the street. To do so, I turn to a set of images that seem to be far removed from the genre of street photography: the photomontages Martha Rosler began making in the late 1960s to protest the war in Vietnam. Two American soldiers lurk and load guns in a bright, white kitchen; in another, a spectacled protester peers into (or blocks the view from) a boys’ bedroom (Figures 1 and 2). With this simple act of cutting and pasting the news, Rosler reframed the way in which the war in Vietnam was being framed.. In her writing and interviews, Rosler often makes note of the simplicity of her montage technique.
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